One of the challenges of writing a weekly essay on the Torah portion along with a weekly podcast script while also serving as the CEO of a growing organization is that there’s not much time for other writing. My first—and to date, only—book came about entirely because I wrote each chapter for IJS’s annual Text Study program in 2020-21 (and I wasn’t yet writing these weekly reflections).

In recent months I’ve gotten some new inspiration for a larger project, which I’m hoping can become a book and which would focus on the idea of home and, even more, on the experience of at-homeness.

Regular readers will recognize that this is a theme I come back to regularly, and it feels to me like there’s something deeper going on here. Yes, clearly there’s something in the topic that animates me personally. But I also sense that questions of at-homeness underlie many of our collective questions and challenges, from borders and migration to Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, to AI and climate change. At the heart of many of these profoundly challenging issues is a deeply personal yet profoundly collective question: How do we feel at home?

I have explored these themes in many of these reflections already (you can look as recently as last week), but I share this preamble to tell you that, in service of this larger writing project, I’d like to use this frame for these reflections for the next little while. And: I hope you’ll write back with your own thoughts and experiences about not only what I have to say, but also where you might suggest we explore in this journey together.

The opening words of Parashat Emor are directed at the main characters of the book of Leviticus, the kohanim (priests): “And YHVH said to Moses, ‘Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them, ‘Let none [of you] defile himself for a dead person among his people’’” (Lev. 21:1). The Midrashic and Talmudic tradition reads this and the verses that follow as the basis for Jewish mourning customs, particularly in defining for whom one is required to mourn. That, in itself, teaches us something about our concept of home: Home is closely associated with the familiar and familial. Thus, who we define as a relative can inform our experience of being at home—particularly with whom we experience being at home.

Yet the verse itself uses neither the words home nor family. The key word for many commentators is the word am, “people.” Rashi, following the Midrash, comments that amav, “his people,” comes to teach that as long as someone from the Israelite people—i.e. the deceased’s extended family—is available to tend to the burial, then the priest should maintain his ritual purity and not become involved in tending to the dead. But, in the case of a met mitzvah, in which there’s no one else to do it, then the priest must become involved.

Rashi invites us to anchor the question of at-homeness in the relationship and status of the priest, who is both of the larger people but also apart from it—itself a key tension underlying the experience of being at home. What does it feel like, and what does it mean, to be at home with one’s immediate relatives? And how does that compare and contrast with being at home within a people, language, culture, civilization?

A Hasidic commentary can help us explore these questions further by interpreting the verse not merely as a commentary on the obligation of burial, but on the ethics of civic life. It comes from Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch (d. 1772): “‘Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron…’ Those who rebuke the people and strive to return them to the good are in the category of ‘Priests, the sons of Aaron.’ And behold, the Torah says to each one of them: ‘Let none defile himself for a dead person among his people.’ At the time when one stands and rebukes the people, one must be careful and cautious not to defile or ruin their own soul through arrogance or ulterior motives.”

The Maggid, following his teacher the Ba’al Shem Tov, interprets the verse as a warning about the dangers inherent in the practice of tochacha, offering rebuke (or, perhaps, negative feedback), particularly by leaders of the people. This is not to say that leaders should avoid tochacha—the Torah just told us it’s a mitzvah in last week’s Torah portion! But, suggests the Maggid, leaders have to do real spiritual discernment to know where our tochacha is coming from: Is it pure? Or are there impure motivations? Is the leader uttering their words of rebuke from a place of genuine love and care for their fellows, or, perhaps, are their words more an expression of their own personal resentment, frustration, and even subtle (or not so subtle) desire for power and position?

While the Maggid seemingly confines his question to religious leaders in positions of authority, I think the rest of us can read ourselves into these questions too. Anyone who has ever lived in relationship with another—in a friendship, a marriage, as a parent or a child—can probably feel some resonance with this teaching. When do we speak up, and how? How do we discern our own motivations? These are intimate questions at the heart of familial relationships (and, perhaps, not a small number of hours in therapist’s office).

Read in the context of the question of at-homeness, I might therefore suggest the Maggid is extending the notion of shalom bayit, peace in the home, well beyond the confines of one’s immediate family—and thus inviting us to play with extending our notion of home as well. Indeed, he’s picking up that idea from the Torah itself. If one way of experiencing at-homeness is through a feeling of kinship and mutual responsibility, then the Maggid and the Torah are inviting us to reflect on whether we feel at home with a larger community—the Jewish people, other collectivities—and, if we do, what responsibilities and ethics might emerge as a result.

For Reflection & Conversation

• How, if at all, do you discern whether to offer tochacha/rebuke? What, if anything, motivates you to speak up? What, if anything, keeps you from doing so?
• How do you relate to Am Yisrael/the Jewish People? Is it a home for you? If so, why? If not, why not? Are there other larger collective groups in which you feel at home?

If you haven’t yet listened to the recent two-part debate between Rabbis Sharon Brous and David Ingber on the podcast “Being Jewish with Jonah Platt,” I want to suggest that you do. In addition to being a model of civil disagreement, their dialogue also expresses a debate taking place within much of the American Jewish community, particularly about our individual and collective relationships with Israel, our sense of and response to anti-Jewish rhetoric and actions, and our political affiliations and alliances.

One of the terms mentioned on the podcast is one I hear frequently these days: a sense of political homelessness. While I will leave the political part to my esteemed colleagues, I want to focus on the second half of that phrase: homelessness—or its inverse, at-homeness. Because the question of where and when we feel at home—or whether we do at all—matters profoundly. One could argue that it’s a throughline, perhaps the throughline, of Jewish life.

Home is not only a place, of course. It’s a place that enables a condition: a sense of safety, ease, agency. To quote Billy Joel in what I would argue is one of his most Jewish lyrics, home is when we feel that “I’ll never be a stranger, and I’ll never be alone.”

If that condition were easy to access and maintain, my guess is that Billy Joel, like so many other songwriters, wouldn’t have been inspired to write about it, and their songs wouldn’t have resonated with so many listeners. At-homeness seems to have a perpetually elusive quality. For so many of us, sensing it, being inside it, requires continual practice.

As my friend Rabbi Zvika Kriger observed in a conversation on this topic this week, being not-at-home seems like an underlying theme of the Torah. From the very first humans, who are expelled from their home in the Garden of Eden moments after their creation, to the Israelites, who, as the Torah ends, have not yet crossed the Jordan River into their promised homeland, the Torah repeatedly invites us to question what it means to be at home—to recognize, in God’s words, that “you are strangers and sojourners with Me.”

We, of course, live in an unusual moment in history. For most of our lifetimes, Jews have had a political and cultural home in the state of Israel. And, at the same time, many or most of us in North America have also experienced a sense of political, and often cultural, at-homeness too. Whether and how one can be at home in multiple places, multiple languages, multiple cultures—that is both a question of much of the contemporary, globalized world, and a primary question for the Jewish people collectively and many of us individually.

Parashat Kedoshim, the second half of the double Torah portion we read this week, includes one of the most famous lines of the Torah: “Do not seek vengeance or bear a grudge against anyone of your people; you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). Rabbi Akiva taught that the second half of this verse is klal gadol baTorah, the great principle of our tradition. Yet one of the most pressing questions of recent decades, and certainly of our moment, is, Who do we understand to be our neighbors? Who do we understand to be our people?

Underlying that question, I believe, is the question of home: Do we share and experience a collective sense of home with our people, with our neighbors? I think we certainly aspire to do so. Must we? What happens if we don’t? Do we still feel at home?

When asked by a prospective convert to summarize the entire Torah while the convert stood on one foot, Hillel the Elder famously inverted Rabbi Akiva’s dictum: “That which is hateful to you do not do unto others—this is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and study.” Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Rotenberg Alter (1799-1866), the founder of the Ger Hasidic dynasty, asks, “Why didn’t Hillel simply quote the verse in Leviticus?” He answers:

“Hillel recognized that the convert wanted to learn the principles of Judaism in an easy and accessible way. He understood that the convert’s perception was limited/fragile at that moment, and that he could only grasp the negative side—namely, not doing evil to others (refraining from what would cause himself pain).”

“However,” continues the rebbe, “to achieve the positive side of love—the level of ‘And you shall love your neighbor as yourself’—would have been beyond his capacity to understand at that time. Therefore, in his desire to bring him closer and bring him under the wings of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah), Hillel used a form of speech that the convert could understand” [in that moment].

I find I’m frequently drawn back to the story of Hillel and the convert (actually there are a few stories in the same place in the Talmud). Perhaps that’s because it’s so deeply about this threshold of at-homeness. The convert—ger, a stranger—is seeking home, which the Talmud describes as coming “under the wings of the Divine Presence.” On so many levels, that’s not a simple thing. Home is complicated (what would therapists do without it?!). And yet, the experience of at-homeness is also uncomplicated: It’s the basic yet deep feeling of welcome, embrace, safety.

While loving our neighbors, and feeling that our neighbors love us, may be the highest expression of that, the essential, irreplaceable ingredient is being able to trust that our neighbors do not seek to do us harm. For too many people—Jews and people who aren’t Jews, in Israel, in America, and around the world—that has become hard to do.

I’ll close with a final observation. This week marked Israel’s 78th Independence Day. In preparation for our 250th Independence Day here in the United States this summer, I recently read Jeremy David Engels’s wonderful little new book, On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World (Parallax Press, 2026). “To declare interdependence,” Engels writes, “is to acknowledge and celebrate a basic and inescapable fact of human existence: each of us is interwoven with other people, other beings, and this beautiful blue orb we call home.”

In my view, the project of collective self-governance is ultimately about enabling each and all of us to feel genuinely at home—on the planet, in our lives, in our languages, cultures, and traditions. Engels writes, and I agree, that awareness of our interdependence is a natural outgrowth of mindfulness, “the practice of being aware of what is going on inside of and around us.” Mindfulness, whether expressed Jewishly or in any other idiom, helps us nurture the habits of the heart that are fundamental to democratic life—and to allowing each and every one of us to be truly, genuinely at home.

For Reflection & Conversation

• When, if ever, have you felt politically at home in a country? What contributed to that?

• When, if ever, have you felt politically homeless? What contributed to that?

• How easy or difficult do you find it to trust that your neighbors don’t seek to do you harm? How do you imagine they feel about you? What, if anything, might you do to promote greater trust between you?